Not Yet Over And Out

The state’s emergency radio project is dead, but its costs keep going up.

IMAGE: happyburbeck.com

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Earlier this year, Gov. John Kitzhaber made clear he
wanted to halt an ugly project he’d inherited when he took office: the
proposed statewide emergency radio system called the Oregon Wireless
Interoperability Network.

Better known as OWIN,
the project had already cost taxpayers $29 million and was a political
embarrassment: State officials misled lawmakers and then-Gov. Ted
Kulongoski about the need for the project and its spiraling costs.

You’d think
Kitzhaber’s decision would have stopped the financial bleeding. It
didn’t. Records now show the final bill for the OWIN fiasco has climbed
to a surprising $55 million—and, WW has learned, this amount still doesn’t include all of the costs.

The
OWIN plan called for building or updating 300 radio towers to allow
emergency responders across the state to talk to one another, something
they can’t always do now. The federal government is requiring public
safety radios across the country to switch to new bandwidths. The $600
million OWIN project was way bigger and more complex than was required.
But records and audits show OWIN officials convinced lawmakers the feds
were indeed requiring the massive new system (not true) and that they
had cut project costs (another fib).

In
February, Kitzhaber proposed scaling the project back. In June,
lawmakers OK’d a plan to replace Oregon State Police and Department of
Transportation radios, and to update failing microwave towers. The state
also rechristened it as the State Radio Project. The price tag came
down a lot but is still a sizable $209 million. (This total includes
money previously blown on OWIN.)

Meanwhile, private
contractors kept billing the state. One company, Federal Engineering of
Fairfax, Va., which came up with the original plan under a $1 million
contract, has since billed taxpayers $7.9 million for its consulting
work. State employees were replaced with high-priced consultants who
cost $250,000-plus a year.

Tom Lauer, who took
over the troubled project last year as major projects director for the
Oregon Department of Transportation, says OWIN’s rising costs came from
commitments the project had made before Kitzhaber hit the brakes. And he
says other costs reflect the state’s efforts to change the project’s
focus from a sprawling network to a simpler plan to replace radios and
equipment.

Then
there’s the political mop-up costs. Lawmakers quietly slipped $10.4
million into a spending bill to pay off local public safety agencies who
had counted on OWIN to help build their own radio systems.

From 2008 to 2010,
OWIN officials wheeled around the state, promising millions to local
governments if they joined the project. Many of these promises were only
handshake deals, and ODOT officials are still trying to figure out how
much money was pledged.

“This hasn’t been an easy thing to untangle,” Lauer says. “This isn’t how we would normally want to go around doing business.”

Lawmakers argued that
these local agencies shouldn’t be left hanging. But records show
lawmakers haven’t been told about other local governments that have been
stiffed by OWIN.

In April 2009,
then-OWIN director Lindsay Ball pledged in a letter to the Eugene Water
and Electric Board that his agency would split the costs of building two
radio towers. EWEB spent $3.2 million to build the towers and now wait
for the state to keep its word.

“It’s too bad the
state isn’t living up to its commitments, because those funds would be
appreciated by our customers,” says EWEB spokesman Joe Harwood. “We
haven’t seen the $1.6 million promised. That’s the way it’s been with
this—lots of promises, none of them kept.”

Rep. John Huffman
(R-The Dalles) says he and other lawmakers worked to shrink the radio
project—but he says they have yet to figure out a way to corral the
costs of huge state technology and construction projects where
bureaucratic momentum has taken hold.

“We try to get some
accountability,” Huffman says. “And we did here to some extent. But you
growl and you bluff, but in the end you’re just teasing a big beast.”